Recently, ink jet printing technology has been used for presentation, graphic arts, engineering drawing and home office applications. The performance requirements for ink jet media used for these applications are quite stringent. The media have to provide fast drying, good color fidelity, high image resolution, and archivability. In addition, the media must perform at different environmental conditions and be capable of being produced at an acceptable cost.
There are many commercial products and proposed designs available in the field. Both inorganic materials and organic polymers have been used in these designs. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,264,275, 5,275,867, 5,104,730, 4,879,166, 4,780,356 proposed designs using porous particles such as pseudo-boehmite, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,503,111, 3,889,270, 4,592,951, 5,102,717, 3,870,549, 4,578,285, 5,101,218 and 5,141,599 proposed designs using organic polymers such as poly(vinyl pyrrolidone), poly(alkyl vinyl ether-maleic acid), a mixture of gelatin and starch, a water insoluble polymer containing a cationic resin, poly(ethylene oxide), and crosslinked poly(vinyl alcohol). Although some of these designs improved some properties, none of them meets all functional performance requirements of a commercial ink jet recording medium. More importantly, none of these designs perform satisfactorily in a full environment range, of from low to high relative humidities (RH). For example, prior known media using inorganic particulates cause ink migration at high humidity and poor handling properties, and prior known media using organic polymers did not reliably give good image resolution and often gave low optical density at low humidity. U.S. Pat. No. 5,264,275 discloses a composite consisting of both inorganic particulate and organic polymer layers. However, this design uses three coating layers on a surface of a base substrate, with the designed product containing two different inorganic particulate layers.